Just a little rant. When I first visited Lemmy Sites a couple of months ago it felt empty. Besides the really mainstream community pretty much everything else just felt empty.

Meanwhile though traffic has increased a lot and I feel well entertained by the traffic in c/hfy c/noncredibledefence c/keepwriting c/worldbuilding and so on. It is certainly less than Reddit but often quality is substancially higher and is "enough" to keep me entertained.

Also I like that you can actually post something without running into a bazillion deletes, bans and moderator shitshat because your post was two words to short, not NCD enough and so on.

Sure, the C64 community on Lemmy is laughable. So is the ARMA community. I still use REddit for that. Also I often check up stuff on r/hfy and r/NCD but since one week I have been prefering Lemmy for that.

Also my longer posts don't get eaten up any more. God, three weeks ago most posts with 3k an more just got lost without feed back. Nowadays I have even manges posts around 20k without breaking them up. Though the editor is still lacking for longer posts. On Reddit I can copy-paste pretty much anything from Libreoffice into Reddits Editor (which is also pretty lacking but differently lacking). On Lemmy I have to run most text through a little perl script to get them even using correct line breaks perl -pe 's/\n/\n\n/' and different sizes for Headlines are much to few to select from.

Not perfect, not even very good but definitely promising.

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[–] BuckRowdy 201 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I don't think people really understand that reddit is an 18 year old product. Their original site was iterated on for 10 years before they stopped building on it.

Lemmy will get there and beyond. As the fediverse attracts more users, it will also attract more contributors. I'm starting to learn Rust myself in hopes I can contribute to the project at some point down the line.

[–] someguy3 87 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Yeah Reddit 10 years ago was very different than Reddit now. Too many people demand* a 1 for 1 replacement right now.

*You don't even need all those people. It was plenty good 10 years ago.

[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I was on reddit before the digg exodus, and the current state of lemmy feels somewhat reminiscent of those times. When communities are smaller there is just a completely different feel than the 1 million+ subscriber goliaths some subreddits became.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That's exactly what it feels like. It's so refreshing and I like the fact I can scroll for about 30 mins, exhaust my feed and step away. I don't get sucked in for most of the day like Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I completely agree. I’ve been hopping on in the morning and in the evening and I don’t feel like I’ve missed anything and I still feel like I’m contributing. The total opposite of how it was with Reddit.

[–] DrQuint 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

If there's one place where I think the wrong Reddit attitude is starting to crop up is the anti/pro sync discourse that's going on.

People are even outright lying about apps. Such as claiming other apps have toms of bugs, meanwhile, I'm trying out sync and there's a comment sorting bug if you switch to top, some comments show up isolated when they're a reply to something else, and even have several lines coming off from nowhere if you turn on colored indentations. Never seen this anywhere else, not even on Jerboa which is the oldest and generally least stable. Another bug, although this one I've seen, is that Sync doesn't properly list all self-posts on the profile pages. Meanwhile, sync IS the most feature rich, and others are denying it. One example, Sync not just has an actual toggle for in-comment media preloading (they called them emotes for some reason), they even let you toggle specific services on generic link handling.

What I did here, is what those people don't. Give specifics. This tribalism is peak upvote downvote fighting style characteristic of big /r/all communities on reddit and I hate it. Garbage threads.

[–] Dark_Blade 3 points 1 year ago

The Sync drama truly is a Reddit moment.

[–] devious 8 points 1 year ago

Honestly, this is exactly how I feel too. I remember browsing Reddit when Digg was my primary source and Reddit felt so small and unpolished at the time! I don't know if Lemmy will grow in the same way as Reddit did, but it is certainly on the right path.

[–] tool 5 points 1 year ago

I was on reddit before the digg exodus

Man, I remember when that shitshow happened. It was like reddit's version of Eternal September.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That was the best era. The source code was open sourced, subreddits members know each other pretty well, the most prolific reditors are not reposters or super-mods. Actually fun AMAs and community-initiated events (meetups, secret santa, etc). Now it's all gone, replaced by a TikTok clone.

[–] SageWaterDragon 4 points 1 year ago

Frankly, I really miss the Reddit of ten years ago, so this is great. Outside of fruitlessly pursuing infinite growth, none of the additions or changes to the site since then have improved it.

[–] givesomefucks 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The flip side is there are some people who have been here a long time tho...

But they're almost exclusively rightwingers who were ip banned from reddit. Like the exploding heads instance is/was over a year old, and those people were insanely annoying before everyone defederated.

The more time goes by, the more regular people join and water down that extremism

[–] o_oli 8 points 1 year ago

Yeah I mean looking at the stats of new users, that watering down has already happened to the point where any extremeist shit is statistically insignificant by now. 99%+ of people here are just looking for a replacement reddit and that's all, rather than some censorship haven where they can chat their extreme views.

[–] BuckRowdy 1 points 1 year ago

Yes it was interesting finding communities banned from Reddit who seemed like they had been here awhile.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I also think you’re going to see Lemmy continue to grow overtime because it does not need to be a Comercial success. It doesn’t need to go through the new owners, whims or financial needs. It’ll just continue to slowly grow until someday it overtakes Reddit. The mere fact that it can’t be taken down is in itself a huge advantage/defense.